The above title is, of course, simply clickbait, since  everyone knows the best jam in the world is actually produced in Megan Markle’s kitchen over in Montecito in California, and marketed under the, “American Riviera Orchard” label. How do we know this? Well partly because she’s told us so, but mostly from empirical evidence: demand appears to be so high it’s simply impossible to buy a jar anywhere!

At the other end of the spectrum, there is probably a lot of competition for the worst jam in the world. A strong contender might be Ticklers “Plum and Apple” jam which was produced in large quantities for the British Army during WW1 and allegedly didn’t contain any of either fruit.  However, we won that particular conflict, so it can’t have been that bad, and anyway it’s not available now. So this leaves the really budget jams from the supermarkets, the cheapest of which, from Aldi, retails at about 39p a jar and seem to be basically thickened cheap fruit juice. It’s probably briefly worth considering if you’re running the household on a tight budget, but ideally you’d want something better for your kids. What you might call ‘basic’ supermarket jam (Tesco) retails for 89p a jar, which is better, but at that price must be a loss-leader.

This rather raises the question of what a jar of jam should cost. Those of us who have tried making our own using fresh fruit know that it can taste so wonderful that the big question becomes, what do the commercial manufacturers do with all the flavour after they’ve taken it all out? We also know it turns out to be somewhat expensive with PYO fruit prices being something north of £11/kg. Thus a jar will usually work out at a little over £3.00.

So this got me thinking:  Can we make a high quality low cost jam? 

Well, the answer is, Yes, you can!

The solution is frozen fruit from the supermarket.  Frozen raspberries retail at about £7.50/kg, so add 1kg of sugar and for £8.60 you can make excellent Raspberry Jam for about £2.15 a jar (allowing for evaporation).   Ok, that’s still expensive. But there are several lower cost alternatives, all of which work well – mixed summer fruits, or Black Forrest mix.

But I recently discovered Tesco sell 1kg bags of so called, “Imperfect fruit”, a mix of blackcurrants, redcurrants, blackberries and strawberries, for the princely sum of £2.99.    Yup, under £3 per kg… and it makes a beautiful mixed fruit jam!  It’s also full of pectin, so there’s no need to add any – any sugar will do. Honestly, I couldn’t believe how good it was.  This is the recipe:

• 1kg bags imperfect frozen fruit (£2.99)
• 1kg granulated sugar (£1.09)
• 1 lemon (use zest and juice) (35p).

Method: defrost fruit in microwave oven, add sugar, lemon juice and zest. Boil until it reaches setting point (104c), breaking up the fruit a bit using the potato masher if necessary. Cool and put into sterilised jars.

Makes 4x 380g jars. Cost per jar, £4.43/4 = £1.11. A bargain!

The only question remaining is where do you get empty jam jars from? Well obviously you can save them, or buy them from Hobbycraft for about £10/doz. That’s quite an overhead, but it’s much cheaper to buy the 39p a jar of jam from Aldi and dispose of the contents – lets face it, at that price they can’t have much food value anyway!